Entrepreneurial Qualities Survey – Wrap-up and Moving Forward
This is follow-up post 3 of 3 to my original survey. In interested, here is the previous recap:
- Survey follow-up 1 of 3 (Review of necessary and supporting qualities)
- Survey follow-up 2 of 3 (The big list of comments)
Continuing my examination of the entrepreneurial survey results, in this post I’ll share changes to the list of entrepreneurial qualities I’ve made based on your feedback, and talk about how to move forward.
Unchanged Qualities
Many of the qualities from the original survey remain unchanged. Whether they got voted as a necessary or supporting quality, they generally were considered a core quality of entrepreneurship. These qualities were:
Communication
Courage
Focus
Hard-working
Initiative
Passion
Positive Attitude
Vision
Charisma
Coachability
Curiosity
Objectivity
Discipline
Faith
Resilience
Changes Made
Based on comments made, I did make some changes to some of the qualities. You made some great comments that really got me thinking in different ways about some of these qualities, so I made the following changes to the list:
Commitment becomes Perseverance
Character becomes Integrity
Creativity becomes Innovation
Flexability becomes Adaptability
Independence becomes Self-Reliance
Additions
Finally, you caught some great qualities that I left off the list, notably:
Comfortable with Risk
Competence
Leadership
Moving Forward
I’ve thought a lot about how to not only take this survey forward, but better ways to represent entrepreneurial qualities.
My tendency usually is to try to distill down long lists into something much shorter. We have a long list of entrepreneurial qualities here and I spent a long time trying to combine qualities and thinking through which maybe shouldn’t be on the list. In the end I decided that all the qualities had merit and instead of trying to reduce them, maybe we just needed a better way to rate them.
The two categories of necessary and supporting ended up feeling kind of arbitrary to me. I gave a lot of thought to a better way to represent the relative importance and have decided that a 10 point rating scale would serve this purpose well. Not only would this give survey responders more flexibility in rating qualities, but aggregate ratings could be averaged for each quality giving us a much better way to identify qualities felt to be more important from those contributing qualities that, while important, might not be as critical. These rankings could also then be used as the basis for an entrepreneurial assessment.
So What’s Next?
I plan on taking all these changes into a new entrepreneurial survey I will run the first thing in the new year, instituting the following changes:
- I’ll use the changed entrepreneurial qualities listed above
- I’ll use a 10 point scale as the basis of quality scoring
- I’d like to limit survey takers to just entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial support personnel
After the survey is completed, I’ll report on the new results and try to come up with a basic entrepreneurial assessment tool. I’d also like to write more articles on the individual qualities and am open to suggestions as to what you would like to see in this area. I think a mix of more “Stories from the Field” showing qualities in action combined with more analytical examinations of each quality is a good mix to start with. I read an article a while back that looked at Courage from an excess/deficit perspective and that might be an series I undertake for all the entrepreneurial qualities.
After the entrepreneurial qualities survey is wrapped up, I’d like to get into the same exercise dedicated to Leadership Traits, the other main topic of discussion planned for this blog. Going forward, I plan on running both an entrepreneurial qualities survey and a leadership traits survey once per year, each. That will let us track trends on the results and hopefully provide you with a basis for your own personal growth or research. I do plan on publishing databases of each survey here on the blog for download.
Thanks again for all the comments and responses. We’ll take the new survey first thing next year.
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